Abstracts Archive

During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the medical gaze turned itself upon the child and the adolescent, promoted them as new objects of science. In both Scotland and France, an alliance between political and medical men was formed to deal with their respective demographic crisis: public...

Designed to study earthquakes, seismographs was from the beginning of the 20th century installed across the globe. In the 1950s it became clear that global seismic monitoring was the most reliable method to detect underground nuclear tests. In 1961, M. Ewing of Columbia University was contacted by E...

Alchemical language is an example of scientia poetica, its Decknamen are coded, ornate and instable. But alchemical language shouldn’t remain ultimate riddle it has come to represent. Couldn’t a computer bring clarity into the poetics of alchemy? After all, poetry is a system and systems can be ...

The paper will introduce the outbreak report as an epidemiological paper technology. Since the late nineteenth century, epidemiology has not only developed statistical instruments and stochastic models, but the formalisation of the budding discipline included also the consolidation of a consistent n...

This paper will examine an oft-overlooked development in the history of twentieth-century biology: the rise of bioenergetics, or the study of energy transformations in living organisms. Through a case study of the work of biochemist Fritz Albert Lipmann and his associates, this paper will describe t...

The main purpose of this study is to analyze the first researches in Physics held at the University of São Paulo (USP), an institution that would become a reference in Brazil. Three important dimensions that characterize the episode are considered: i) The Sociopolitical Context: São Paulo's politi...

The paper traces a debate about species transmutation that unfolded in agricultural periodicals published in the Northeastern United States between 1820 and 1859. During the nineteenth century, numerous members of New England farming communities believed that particular environmental conditions coul...

As is well known in the history of mathematics, the path to the invention of calculus in late seventeenth-century Europe passed through Buonaventura Cavalieri’s geometry of “indivisibles,” the infinitesimally small slices into which he proposed dividing geometric figures in order to compute th...

It is known that throughout the seventeenth century the world system proposed by Tycho Brahe (1546-1601) assumed a preponderant position in the Iberian cosmological debate, affirming itself as the one with the best agreement to empirical evidence. Moreover, the Tychonian model (or variants thereof) ...

The telephone in inter-war Britain was an important tool for both the identification and categorisation of individual hearing loss. Between 1912 and 1981, the British Post Office had control over a nationalised telephone system. Linkage between telephony and hearing has long been noted by historians...

A recent exhibition of medical manuscripts at the Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia (IAMM) entitled Al-Tibb: Healing Traditions in Islamic Medical Manuscripts successfully raised awareness of traditional healing among Malays featuring the museum’s collection of Malay medical and divination manuscripts....

In the history of the circulation of knowledge certain objects may be considered as paradigmatic of the ways through which information about territories and people was produced. The namban screens and the maps of the Relaciones Geográficas de Indias – RGI, both produced in the second half of the ...

Pre-modern celestial observers had difficulty understanding the positions of the sun, Mercury, and Venus in a geocentric planetary order. Prominent ancients – Plato, Aristotle, Archimedes, Cicero, and Ptolemy – were inconsistent in their statements regarding the placement of the inferior planets...

In recent years, thanks to scholarship from Wolff, Mancini, Bauer, and others, the sexologist and gay rights activist Magnus Hirschfeld has returned from obscurity to claim a place at the forefront of European LGBT history. But, with the major exception of Sengoopta’s work, Hirschfeld is less prom...

The aim of this paper is to provide a contribution to the historiographic agenda regarding the idea of the circulation of knowledge, the Global History of Knowledge and the debate surrounding scientific 'centres' and 'peripheries' (1, 2). We examine the University of Coimbra Laboratory of Experiment...

This paper attempts to reconstruct the political economy of data in eighteenth century mathematics and astronomy. I argue the construction of Hindu cosmology in late eighteenth century Orientalist discourse was a product of practical efforts, like surveying and astronomical observation. In, 1784, Th...

My presentation investigates two key concepts that both in historical and museological research need more analysis on – virtual travel and immersion – and their relationships with the 17th century English natural history collections, commonly known as cabinets of curiosity. Virtual travel is a c...

This paper recovers a significant body of Julian Huxley’s early writings concerning the biology of sex determination, sex development and sexual behavior. Following the success of his studies relating to avian courtship, Huxley envisaged a more integrated approach to the study of animal behavior w...

In 1971, biologists Stephen Jay Gould and Richard C. Lewontin criticized the agenda that had “dominated evolutionary thought in England and the United States” according to which natural selection is seen as an “optimizing agent”. Conversely, they proposed a different standpoint on evolution,...

This paper scrutinizes the revisions of mathematician Bernhard Riemann’s (1822-1862) 1854 habilitation lecture at the University of Göttingen. It argues that the lecture is a reflection of how mathematicians developed non-Euclidean geometries in the nineteenth century, breaking with long-standing...

In the final year of World War II, scientists advising the U.S. government on hormone herbicide research struggled to develop censorship practices that blended conventional modes of publication with the comparatively draconian model of atomic secrecy. Botanist Ezra J. Kraus encountered this dilemma ...

During the height of the Cold War, the future as an object of scientific inquiry gained traction among both Western and Eastern nations, resulting in new fields such as future studies. Yet future studies was a motley field with a variety of techniques, conceptions of the future, and political vision...

After Galileo’s remarkable demonstration of the rugged surface of the moon, several attempts to provide a comprehensive cartography were conducted, culminating with Johannes Hevelius’s lavish Selenographia (1647). By representing each phase of the moon, Hevelius did not only intend to give an ac...

Eighteenth-century France was marked by distinctly “odored” phenomena. The rise of industry led to the emission of mephitic aerial pollutants while disease outbreaks caused an overcrowding of hospitals, which became noxious institutions in many cities. These smelly realities and the anxieties th...

The idealized representation of geological strata is one of the most striking aspects of late fifteenth-century Italian pictorial landscapes. Yet medieval learned “meteorology”, which also included today’s geology and mineralogy, largely ignored this highly visible feature of the Earth’s sur...

In the 1960s and 70s, architects and designers looked to the sciences for inspiration and a systematic approach to shaping environments rich in information. This is particularly evident in an approach promoted by the Herman Miller Research Corporation (HMRC), a division of the iconic furniture manuf...

The United States Exploring Expedition (1838-1842) owed much of its realisation to the advocacy of Jeremiah Reynolds, a former newspaper man and public lecturer. His strongest case for the necessity of Pacific exploration were New England whalers who were said to cruise unexplored parts of the ocean...